Azal Fadhil Kadhim Aljawazri, M.A student of English Language and Literature, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad,
Rajabali Askarzadeh Torghabeh, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, (corresponding author),
Azra Ghandeharion, Assistant Professor in English Literature, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad
Abstract
This study is an attempt to use the feminist approach in order to study how the boundaries and restrictions of the society are depicted in The Bell Jar, and also in the lives of its key characters. The feminist approach has been selected, because the time when the novel was written coincided with women’s sufferings due to their inability to adjust themselves to a patriarchal society’s traditions. For example, they had to stay virgins until marriage, whereas men were expected to be experienced with sex (Lamb, 2011, p. 30). Also, the feminist approach is useful in this study, because its main character is a young girl whose breakdown is due to her inability to come to terms with such traditions. So, the main critic whose theory has been selected to be applied in this study is Betty Friedan (1921–2006) in order to shed light on the dilemma and identity crisis of the American woman during the 1950s and 1960s due to a flawless image of domestic womanhood which was spread through different forms of media.
Key Words: Betty Friedan, Second wave feminism, Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
(To Download PDF File of This Full Article in full Details, Click Here)
- Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
The second-wave feminism was the feminists’ attempt in the 1960s and 1970s to discuss many different features of women’s life such as family, sexuality, and work. This wave showed women’s displeasure with domestic limitations and workplace discernment. This wave’s development happened in the context of the anti-Vietnam War and civil rights movements, and also the increasing self-consciousness of a range of marginal groups around the world. In this phase, sexuality and multiplicative rights were the main issues, and much of the movement’s purpose was to spread social equality regardless of sex.
Simon de Beauvoir is an important scholar in this wave of feminism. One of her famous books, The Second Sex (1949) is also considered as a key work of feminist attitude and the starting point of second-wave feminism. This book is actually regarded as one of the earliest attempts of the feminist critics. De Beauvoir’s primary proposition in this book is that women are oppressed by men who characterize them as the ”Other”. De Beauvoir has also claimed that it may seem a natural event if humans identify themselves in opposition to others, but this route should not be allowed in case of the genders, since men’s regarding women as the “other” deprives them of their humanity.
In Book I, entitled ”Facts and Myths,” she asks how ”female humans” come to occupy a secondary place in society. To answer this question, de Beauvoir has discussed biology, psychoanalysis, and historical materialism which reveal indisputable ”essential” differences between men and women, but provide no justification for woman’s inferiority. She then discusses history to touch the rise of male dominance in the society. Here she finds a large number of examples of female subordination, but again, there is no convincing justification for them. De Beauvoir next discusses several mythical depictions of women and reveals how these myths have fixed human consciousness, often to the disadvantage of women.
In Book II, entitled ”Woman’s Life Today,” she analyzes the female growth through different stages: childhood, youth, and sexual instigation. Her main purpose is to prove that women are not born feminine, but are molded by a thousand exterior practices. They are also deprived of their individuality by different factors in the society. So, they have to accept a displeasing life of housework, pregnancy, and sexual slavishness. De Beauvoir also analyzes the various situations or roles that the adult women have in their lives, including three major functions: wife, mother, and entertainer, leading to immanence, incompleteness, and intense hindrance. De Beauvoir has also reflected on the suffering of the old age. She has stated that after losing the reproductive ability, a woman loses her main determination and her identity.
In the final chapter of this section, ”Woman’s Situation and Character,” de Beauvoir repeats the provocative assertion that woman’s situation is not a result of her character, but a result of her situation. Her weakness, lack of triumph, idleness, and inaction are all the results of her subordination, not the cause. In ”Justifications,” de Beauvoir has surveyed some of the ways that women underline their own enslavement. Throughout the book, de Beauvoir has talked extensively about numerous examples of how females are blamed for their Otherness, particularly with regard to marriage. The difficulty of breaking free from ”femininity” makes many women accept the usual unsatisfactory roles of wife and mother. De Beauvoir states that if women can support themselves, they can also achieve a form of emancipation. Eventually and in the closing chapters of The Second Sex, de Beauvoir discusses the logistical difficulties that many women face in chasing this objective.
In addition to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex as a universal best seller which intended to advance feminist consciousness by stressing that liberation for women was liberation for men too, the role of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) as the first public suggestion that change was imminent cannot be ignored in this regard. This book mainly discussed the problem that ”lay buried, unspoken” in the minds of the suburban housewife: absolute tedium and absence of contentment. Friedan argued that many women were deeply deadened by domesticity. The next section is going to analyze this feminist’s attitudes in a more detailed way.
What encouraged Friedan to write The Feminine Mystique was her purpose to shed light on the dilemma and identity crisis of the American woman during the 1950s and 1960s due to a flawless image of domestic womanhood which was spread through different forms of media. She had a lot of interviews with American housewives, and came to the conclusion that many of them would suffer from an unescapable and baffling sense of disappointment; this is what she called ”the problem that has no name.”
World War II as the most significant event is generally regarded as the main motivation for the establishment of the feminine mystique. Throughout the book, Friedan has compared many prewar and postwar statistics and examples to support her arguments. Friedan has also traced the return of women to the domestic life after their pre-war liberation, and argues that women were socially forced into becoming homemakers by the ”feminine mystique” as an ideal image of domestic femininity that arose in the 1950s. The feminine mystique was strengthened through education, popular media, and academic theories. Meanwhile, it was misused by advertisers who were after selling products to unhappy housewives. Friedan proclaims that that the life of a housewife prevents women from evolving independent identities; so, both men and women must throw away the feminine mystique.
Thus, Friedan’s main concern has been with the influence of gender, race, and class within the home, where she has identified as a political environment. Although The Feminine Mystique is widely considered liberal in its discussions, Friedan has offered one of the most radical criticisms of the home. She has demystified feminine ideals by locating their origins in social, political, and historical realities, and submitted the “private” sector of the suburban home to public scrutiny. She argues that the suburban home is the supporter of patriarchy and capitalism, and is thus an endorsing location of women’s subjugation.
What distinguishes this eminent feminist from the other critics of feminism is that she did more than write about discussing gender stereotypes by endorsing a powerful change. She co-founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966, serving as its first president. As Friedan described in The Feminine Mystique, many women would think that their unhappiness was a personal problem; thus, they blamed themselves for their depression. Earlier books – including Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (published in English in 1953), Mirra Komarovsky’s Women in the Modern World (1953), and Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein’s Women’s Two Roles (1956) had detected women’s repression and second-class position, but none of them talked about the women’s unhappiness in a way that The Feminine Mystique did. Now, this study attempts to analyze The Bell Jar through Friedan’s theories.
1.2 Towards Theoretical Framework
This study applies the theories of Betty Friedan as a second-wave feminist, because The Bell Jar covers the theories of the second wave of feminism in significant ways, even though it was published several years before the movement started. Thus, this study will analyze and discuss the challenging relation of the novel and its author to the second-wave feminism.
Actually, the society of the 1950s imposes such beliefs that women’s only choice is to wait to be married and become a mother which is something that does not seem to interest Esther; this issue results in another form of oppression for women, that marriage is an obligation for all women at a young age. As it seems, Plath’s depiction of women in this novel as the victims of both men and the society is to show how the society enables men to treat women the way they do without thinking of the consequences of such actions.
Contemporary feminist critical principles include an extensive range of ideas. By the mid-20th century, women still lacked some important rights like what can be observed in The Bell Jar. The main critic whose theory has been selected to be applied in this study is Betty Friedan (1921–2006). Her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique as a key book related to the second wave feminism made her be regarded as a well-known American writer and feminist, and also as an important figure in the women’s movement in the United States.
The significance of choosing this theorist is that in The Feminine Mystique, she has articulated two central questions of feminist criticism: ” Who am I, and What do I want out of life?”’ (Bressler, 2011, p. 151), which are really important regarding the analysis of Esther’s character. In fact, it can be claimed that although The Bell Jar has been analyzed by different critics and through different approaches, there still remains a gap regarding the impact of the family and the society on an individual’s identity in the context of the 1950s American society; so, this study aims to fill the existing gap.
So far, The Bell Jar has been analyzed through different perspectives; for example, Butscher (1976) has argued that Plath’s The Bell Jar was really a watershed, since her tragic suicide was the waste land from which the contemporary women have, and will, free themselves. Bonds (1990) has also declared that The Bell Jar makes apparent the oppressive force of the model of separative selfhood which dominates a patriarchal culture. In another article, Lauretis (1976) has argued that The Bell Jar is a synchronic view of womanhood, in which we do not find archetypes such as the ewig Weibliche, the Virgin Mother of God, Eve the Temptress, and other man-made glorifications or condemnations of man’s desire, to which women have so long adhered that they have accepted them as their own image.
- Relevant Studies
The Bell Jar (1971) as this study’s primary source narrates the story of a young girl named Esther Greenwood who is smart, beautiful, brilliant, and prosperous. Plath demonstrates Esther’s insanity in order to show the profound infiltration into the dimmest and most disturbing points of the human spirit. As the secondary sources, Plath has been studied by so many thinkers; for example, Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics (2002) talks about how in The Bell Jar, Plath has commented on the conflicts which were specific to women’s bodies. These themes lead to a specifically feminist critique of the patriarchy. This book studies the association between Plath’s writing and the Cold War and argues that the time (1960–1963), the place (England), and the politics are important issues to consider when we consider Plath’s poetry and fiction.
Moreover, Buell in ”Sylvia Plath’s Traditionalism” (1976) has argued that Esther’s connections to Joan and Doreen have lesbian overtones and suggest aspects of Esther’s incomplete identity. This struggle is what Frederick Buell focuses on when he argues that Esther’s identity struggles are the result of her frightening lack of an inner, stable self’. A Ritual of Being Born Twice (1972) as another important collection in this regard argues that Esther’s search for her identity represents an important struggle throughout the novel. As argues, the ultimate prize in Esther’s pursuit would be the discovery of her one true self. Perloff believes that Esther is successful in her quest and learns to be herself rather than what others expect her to be.
In ”Plath’s The Bell Jar as Female Bildungsroman” (1986), Wagner argues that many of the episodes in the latter part of the novel are skeletal. It is as if Plath was unwilling to give up any important details but that she also realized that her readers were, in effect, reading two stories. The first half of The Bell Jar gives the classic female orientation and education with obvious indications of the failure of that education appearing near the end of the New York experience. The second half gives an equally classic picture of mental deterioration and its treatment, a picture relatively new to fiction in the late 1950s, important both culturally and personally to Plath. But the exigencies of the fictional form were pressing, and Plath had already crowded many characters and episodes into her structure.
It is also argued in Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness (1976) that Plath’s The Bell Jar, slight a novel as it might be in the future and as judged against those works that grew out of it and away from it, was really the watershed. And Plath’s tragic suicide was the waste land from which contemporary women have, and will, free themselves. Lauretis (1976) also argues that The Bell Jar is not a single case history, but rather a synchronic view of womanhood, for once seen from the woman’s perspective. In it we do not find archetypes such as the ewig Weibliche, the Virgin Mother of God, Eve the Temptress, and other man-made glorifications or condemnations of man’s desire, to which women have so long adhered that they have accepted them as their own image.
In addition, ”The Separative Self in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar” (1990) has discussed that The Bell Jar makes apparent the oppressive force (at least for women) of the model of separative selfhood which dominates patriarchal culture. The novel dramatizes a double bind for women in which, on the one hand, an authentic self is one that is presumed to be autonomous and whole, entire to itself and clearly bounded, and yet in which, on the other hand, women have their identity primarily through relationship to a man.
As an important book regarding the issue of feminism that is one of the present study’s theories, Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) portrays the roles of women, especially the full-time housewife role which Friedan believed to be really boring. In her book, Friedan described a dejected suburban housewife who left college at the age of 19 to get married and raise her kids. She spoke of her own ‘terror’ at being alone, wrote that she had never once in her life seen a positive female role-model who worked outside the home and also kept a family.
In the 1970s sex was a significant point to feminists because it was regarded by the white middle-class women as a central feature to their subjugation and their freedom. In Desiring Revolution: Second-Wave Feminism and the Rewriting of Twentieth-Century American Sexual Thought, Gerhard (2001) discusses the reasons why this issue, sex, became important to these “second-wave feminists.” In order to analyze this matter, Gerhard talks about the varied views of sexuality within feminism. The importance of this book to this study is because it investigates the work of Betty Friedan as the main theorist of this study, Germaine Greer, Erica Jong, and Kate Millet, among many others in order to study the mentioned points.
Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America’s Second Wave (2004) is a discussion of the progress of white women’s freedom, black feminism, and Chicana feminism in the 1960s and 1970s when was known as the “second wave” of U.S. feminist protest. Benita Roth inspects the ways that feminist movements emerged from the Civil Rights/Black Liberation movement, the Chicano movement, and the white left that reinforced political forming resolutions by feminists.
Second-wave feminists had many challenges. One of these challenges was discussing relationships between women and men. ”Second-Wave Feminism and the Politics of Relationships” (2000) argues that probing into these relationships led to the comprehension of sexuality as both creating and created by the social associations of power. This vision was imperfect because of a feminist view of power which disallowed a productive examination of variances between women and could generate encounters between feminists.
Budick’s article titles as ”The Feminist Discourse of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar” (1987) has also discussed is that the condition of women in the modern world is obviously a key concern of Plath’s The Bell Jar. It also states that Esther’s suicide that is a kind of rebirth is regarded as a self-birth. But it is also a marriage of the heart. In leaving the safety of the womb, she unites herself with the world, the same world that has caused her so much discomfort.
Maple (2009) as another critic argues that one effect of the interest in disability as an identity category over the past few decades has been the inspection of depictions of disability in literature. Although Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is not classically read from the viewpoint of disability theory, Esther’s identity is molded not just by her experiences as a woman, but as a disabled one. For this reason, Esther’s experiences cannot be completely enlightened by either feminism or disability theory self-reliantly, and this requires some mixture of the two.
Smith (2008) is another critic who has employed Butler’s theory of performativity to evaluate the policies of female identity development. She has also showed how functionalist methods arising from popular Freudianism would define gender roles as primarily biologically determined and see opposing models of sexuality and female discontent as illnesses curable by psychology.
“Funny and Tender and not a Desperate Woman:” Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, and Therapeutic Laughter” (2013) discusses that it is uncertain to what extent Esther Greenwood is able to cast off the anxieties that the postwar American women may face. At the novel’s end, she remains uncertain about her future and even seems slightly concerned about the fact that she doesn’t know who would marry me now. It claims that we know almost nothing about the mature Esther who narrates the story, so we cannot say with certainty whether she has followed the norms or found a new ideal of domesticity. Finally, it is announced that this is not to suggest that Plath’s message is that Esther should simply bear it. Rather, the critical distance that humor provides lets her continue to lift the bell jar.
- Discussion
Many critics have had a feminist approach towards The Bell Jar and this issue is an obvious reflection of the specific distresses of the time during which it was written. For instance, E. Miller Budick (1987) has inspected Esther’s struggle against male language, and has argued that the novel embodies a “feminist aesthetic,” or “a language and an art competent to secure women, especially the female writer, against male domination” (p. 872). Diane S. Bonds (1990) has also focused on the feminist anxieties of the novel by discussing the ways in which the novel validates the oppressive effects the “separative” model of selfhood can have for women.
For Budick (1987), who claims the novel is constructed “out of uniquely feminine experiences concerning specifically female themes” (p. 873), Esther’s “madness” is one of the novel’s major themes, along with “powerlessness, betrayal, and victimization” (p. 872). Perloff has also (1972) asserted that Esther’s “dilemma” is mostly a result of “being a woman in a society whose guidelines for women she can neither accept nor reject” (p. 511). As mentioned, it seems that feminist concerns are the central focus of the novel, since Plath obviously shows that Esther’s struggle against patriarchal oppression is the main reason to her collapse.
In 1963, Betty Friedan and Sylvia Plath published The Feminine Mystique and The Bell Jar almost simultaneously. Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was highly groundbreaking because of its portrait of the discontent that she and many other women at that time experienced as a result of social stress and limitations, making them dedicate themselves to being housewives.
Plath’s novel which has been set at a time of huge cultural and social angsts of the fifties is about a woman’s difficulty searching for her true self and identity in a male-dominated society. Esther Greenwood as this novel’s main character loses control over her life, because she cannot adopt herself with what the society expects her. In fact, Plath has attempted to portray the dilemma that a young woman may face in her life through the story of Esther. This character is mainly struggling to find and prove herself in a male world where women’s life is constructed based on certain standards that control women’s determinations and ambitions. Similarly, Plath’s The Bell Jar is the story of Esther Greenwood, and is regarded as a thorough demonstration of herself. Esther’s melancholy is caused by her powerlessness to find her place in a society with determined expectations of femininity. Both Friedan’s housewife and Plath’s Esther Greenwood experience the same burdens.
Historically, there have been a number of social norms and rules of what it meant to be a woman and thus. Even though women have the same rights as men today in many cultures, there are still some issues which are essential to be talked about. In fact, the society in which this novel occurs has got some especial standards for young women like Esther that they have to attain so that they are recognized by men. These standards include their appearance and their feminine abilities.
(To Download PDF File of This Full Article in full Details, Click Here)
Consumerism was considered as an important feature of the1950s in America. Items such as vacuum cleaners, toasters, and washing machines were advertised towards women to provide them with more freedom in order to satisfy their needs and help them become more proficient in their domestic chores. While men worked to get money, women stayed home and worked to create a ”haven” for their family (Radek, 2001). In this setting, young girls and women were taught to be ideal housewives. The most important task of a woman was to take care of the family and house.
This is in close accordance with what Mikkelson and David (2008) have stated that ”have dinner ready, prepare yourself, prepare the children, minimize all noise, be happy to see him, listen to him, make the evening his” as what young girls and women were taught at schools in the 1950s. In fact, they had to be perfect in both the private and public spheres. In 1963, Betty Friedan as one of the greatest feminist thinkers of the second wave feminism in America wrote her revolutionary book The Feminine Mystique in order to explain the problem that many American women were experiencing in the fifties, namely, “the problem that has no name”. Matthews (1989) has declared that ”she called the malaise she thought to be afflicting the middle-class housewife” (p. 197).
The message of Friedan’s book was directed specifically towards women like Plath who struggled against many of the discriminations and assumptions about gender in America. In particular, Plath directly experienced the anti-intellectual prejudice of popular women’s magazines, as discussed in Friedan’s second chapter, during her internship at Mademoiselle Magazine in New York. Plath negotiated successful gender roles in her own life in part by attaining what Friedan suggests as the ”New Life Plan” for women in the book’s final chapter: that is, completing her education for its own sake rather than to pass the time until marriage, and starting a career plan prior to, and separate from, a plan for marriage and child-raising.
In her book, Friedan has claimed that American women are troubled by the feeling that something is wrong but their inability to explain the problem makes them even more bothered. This can be seen at the beginning of The Bell Jar, where Esther admits that “I knew there was something wrong with me that summer” (Plath, 2013, p. 1). Here, Esther cannot describe in a clear way what she means by that “something”, which Friedan labels as “the problem that has no name”.
In the first chapter of her book, Friedan has discussed women’s discontent and disappointment. She has announced that women cannot explain the reason for their dissatisfaction; they just know that something is wrong. Friedan (2010) regrets that many girls drop out of college to get married and start a family (p. 12). She believes that this issue will hurt women in a bad way. Friedan suggests that in this particular era passing college courses does not matter anymore, since there seems to be a far more important exam for women to pass an exam that would help them get their most prestigious degree yet (ibid.). Friedan (2010) has also satirized this new degree by referring to it as “Ph.T.”, or “Putting the Husband Through” (p. 12).
Friedan has also stated that in the 1960s, ”the problem that has no name burst like a boil trough the image of the happy American housewife” (Friedan, 2010, p. 11). The unhappiness of women in America was unexpectedly being conveyed and recognized. Little by little, the whole issues of magazines, newspapers, and books began to be devoted to the problem. When The Feminine Mystique was published, Friedan drew all the attention towards herself. During her interviews in some magazines and TV, ”she consistently challenged the conventional wisdom about women” (Matthews, 1989, p. 219). Friedan believed that ”the problem that has no name” could be solved only through women themselves, since they have to confront the ”housewife trap” and start paying attention to their own voice. Furthermore, Friedan has argued that:
[o]nce she begins to see through the delusions of the feminine mystique – and realizes that neither her husband nor her children, nor the things in her house, nor sex, nor being like all the other women, can give her a self – she often finds the solution much easier than she anticipated. (Friedan, 2010, p. 274)
Friedan emphasizes that women have to provide the solution by themselves, not by depending on others. They must ask themselves ”what do I want to do?” and then seek answers in order to determine their own individuality (ibid). According to Friedan in The Feminine Mystique (1963), an American woman was described as ”healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned only about her husband, her children, her home” (Friedan, 2010, p. 7). Friedan (2010) questioned why women decided to go back home, when not long ago they fought for their own place in the world (p. 24). Gradually, housewives all over America had a rising feeling, but unable to describe it: ”Is this all?” (p. 51). Thus, Friedan wrote her book as a detailed account of how the female role had developed during the 50s and 60s, while emphasizing the American women and their everyday lives:
The problem was dismissed by telling the housewife that she doesn’t realize how lucky she is –her own boss, no time clock, no junior executive gunning for her job. What if she isn’t happy –does she think men are happy in this world? Does she really, secretly, still want to be a man? Doesn’t she know yet how lucky she is to be a woman? (Friedan, 2010, p. 13)
Similar to women in the Victorian epoch, the American women of the 1950s also adopted the idea of womanhood through diverse means. Ann Oakley (as cited in Wolf, 2015, p. 64) writes in Housewife: ”In psychological terms, […] they enabled the harassed mother, the overburdened housewife, to make contact with her ideal self: that self which aspires to be a good wife, a good mother, and an efficient homemaker […] Women’s expected role in society [was] to strive after perfection in all three roles” (p. 64).
Many of these issues, particularly the issue of self-identity, have been addressed by The Bell Jar. This novel can be regarded as ”a statement of what happens to a woman’s hopes and ambitions in a society that has no interest in taking female ideas and aspirations seriously” (Höhn, 2007, p. 34). Plath has actually been preoccupied with revealing Esther’s notion of ”me” in order to see how it is related to the social context of the 1950s America. Much like the Victorian era, this was a time when women tried to get rid of these stereotypical architypes; however, they were not supported by the society.
America in the 1950s was defined by the notion of gendered domains, because magazines and books would dictate women the expectations of the society. According to Jennifer Holt in her article ”The Ideal Woman” (2006), the ideology viewed the house as a domestic haven in which women were ”domestic managers”. The world of work was defined as male, while the world of home was defined as female. This distinction was mainly based on the supposition that men and women were dissimilar, and that women were both physically and mentally lesser. The American woman was in fact expected to make a quiet and happy place for her husband and children. She was also supposed to be the domestic caregiver with ”sole responsibility for the home and child rearing”, while her husband ”brought home the bacon” (Holt, 2006).
According to Glenna Matthews in Just a Housewife: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America (1989), while this image of the ideal woman made women live according to the accepted social principles, many women also felt like servants to their children and husbands, and feared a lifetime of domestic imprisonment (p. 212). In fact, women at that time had to adopt some roles and rules that were not pleasant for them. So, those who were more daring tried not to be like the obedient women.
For example, Esther as a young girl who has difficulty adjusting herself to the social norms tries to be different by imitating the different women such as Elly Higginbottom and a fictional protagonist named Elaine. Elly represents the woman that Esther admires so much, since she makes Esther forget about her worries. Bernard (1978) states that ”[w]hatever Esther Greenwood is, Elly represents the Other. Esther is insecure of herself, while Elly seems to be self-confident. Esther comes from Boston, a place where she feels constrained by people like her mother and Mrs. Willard to be sexually proper and conventional” (p. 25).
Elly comes from Chicago, ”the sort of place where unconventional, mixed up people would come from” (Plath, 2013, p. 127). Esther is a student from a ”big eastern women`s college” who reads and writes “long papers on the twins in James Joyce” (ibid), and is scared of becoming a married housewife, while Elly is not a student, nor is she afraid of getting married: ”And one day I might just marry a virile, but tender, garage mechanic and have a big cowy family” (ibid).
This is why Esther identifies herself with Elaine as a fictional character, ”My heroine would be myself, only in disguise” (Plath, 2013, p. 116). By doing so, Esther is showing her objection against the society’s standards, and withdrawing from them. Thus, she is more dejected and imprisoned in the bell jar. It can be claimed that it is the paradox of endless prospects and restrictions that pushes Esther into a dilemma, and the only solution is suicide.
In the years after the Second World War, many working women lost their jobs, and turned to the media to know how to lead their lives. This caused them to be unsure of their real identity; so, they looked to the ”glossy public image” to decide about their lives (Friedan, 2010, pp. 53-54). Holt (2006) notes that throughout almost every source discussing the domestic ideal there is a consensus that media, principally magazines and film, were the chief means of which this model was transferred to women, in effect the social construction agent. These ideals of womanhood were found in women’s magazines, newspaper, and in fiction.
Women’s magazines played a key part in this regard. In The Bell Jar, Esther gets interested in the beauty and fashion industries that she encounters in New York. Early in the novel, she describes Doreen’s fashion-conscious college, where ”girls had pocket-book covers made out of the same material as their dresses” (Plath, 2013, p. 5). Throughout the novel, Esther even refers to herself, in the beginning as ”tripping about in […] patent leather shoes I’d bought in Bloomingdale’s […] with a black patent leather belt and black patent leather pocket-book to match” (p. 2).
According to Friedan (2010), media, especially women’s magazines, and different institutions in America should be regarded as guilty of compelling girls into the false feminine image. She states that women in the Victorian era both dreamed and fought for equality, while women in the 1950s went back to the domestic domain (p. 24). If one looks at the magazines from 1939, the superstars of women’s magazines stories were quite different. They were New Women, creating a new identity and a life of their own (pp. 24-25). The majority of heroines were business women, happy, proud, and delightfully women who loved and were loved by men. They had several professions, like nurses, teachers, artists, actresses, and saleswomen, and were less aggressive in pursuit of a man, as their life included a different kind of love story (p. 25).
An ideal housewife was defined in magazines as ”healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned only about her husband, her children, her home” (Friedan, 2010, p. 7). Experts told women how to ”catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed children and handle their toilet training […], act more feminine and make marriage more exciting” (p. 5). The images of women in the magazines signified them as young and lighthearted, almost innocent. They ”were fluffy and feminine; passive, gaily content in a world of bedroom and kitchen, sex, babies, and home” (p. 23). Women all over America were more or less influenced by the image presented by women’s magazines, by advertisements, television, movies, novels, books by experts on marriage and the family, child psychology, sexual adjustment, and by the commercialization of sociology and psychotherapy (p. 21).
As a result, women had to imitate the social standards of femininity. In case of The Bell Jar, it seems that Esther has assimilated these ideological messages, and at the same time she does not know how to discard them. Esther condemns marriage and psychoanalysis openly, as well as the power relationships between men and women. But does not ”rise to a similar level of protest against the values promoted by the beauty and fashion industries” (Friedan, 2010, p. 139). A male writer in a women’s magazine elaborated: ”Our readers are housewives, full time; they’re not interested in the broad public issues of the day; they are only interested in the family and the home” (Friedan, 2010:24).
In The Bell Jar, there are many different institutions that tell Esther how to behave and look. Esther is like many other ones overcome by these institutions, and does not know how to resist them. In fact, it is due to the enormous pressure to conform to the society’s standards of femininity that Esther is unable to criticize such institutions. Friedan has also claimed that women in America gradually turned more and more disheartened because of their restrictive roles.
American women suffered alone while they were making beds, shopping, eating with their children, and lying beside their husbands at night (Friedan, 2010, p. 5). Media and experts told women that their role was to ”seek fulfillment as wives and mothers”. Women were ashamed and embarrassed to admit that something was not feeling right. They felt as they did not exist and some doctors even called it “the housewife syndrome” (p. 10). A vast number of men claimed that this was what it meant to be a woman (p. 13).
As mentioned before, The Bell Jar criticizes the society where women are expected to be pure and unblemished before marriage and men were not. Esther has unexperienced outlooks of what marriage and sex should be like because of her mother and others in her social surrounding. She believes that in order to ”be acceptable as a wife she must remain a virgin, and after marriage she must assume a submissive domestic role” (Bernard, 1978, pp. 25-26). She protestors against these beliefs due to their being restrictive and the fact that men are not limited by similar rules (p. 26).
During the fifties, women were not allowed to have premarital sex, because it was considered as damaging to both themselves and the society (Ferretter, 2010, p. 117). Ferretter (2010, p. 117) also argues that this kind of sex was believed to lead to ”mental and emotional conflict” in girls; in fact, it would ”lead to a misguided choice of partner with whom you have nothing but sex in common” (p. 117).
Esther believes that the world is divided ”into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn’t” (Plath, 2013, p. 77). She is preoccupied with love and sex, but it also frightens her. When Buddy takes off his clothes, the sight of him depresses her. Esther describes Buddy’s penis as disgusting: ”The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzard” (2013, p. 64).
Buddy is the symbol of the society’s insincerity. He tells Esther that he lost his virginity to a waitress, but he still expects Esther to stay pure which infuriates Esther. In the novel, Esther’s mother sends her an article called ”In Defense of Chastity” (Plath, 2013, p. 76). Esther declares that the main point of the article was that a ”man’s world is different from a woman’s world and a man’s emotions are different from a woman’s emotions and only marriage can bring the two worlds […] together” (Plath, 2013, p. 76). Consequently, the only opportunity for a safe, happy life would be through marriage. When Esther thinks of marriage, she admits that:
[i]t would mean getting up at seven and cooking [my husband] eggs and bacon and toast and coffee . . ., and then when he came home after a lively, fascinating day he’d expect a big dinner, and I’d spend the evening washing up even more dirty plates till I fell into bed, utterly exhausted. (Plath, 2013, p. 68)
Esther knows that marriage will destroy her own identity. She thinks of being only a housewife and mom as ”brainwashed” and ”numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state” (Plath, 2013, p. 81). She wants to become ”the arrow” by having the chance to do whatever she wants. But if Esther acts in this way, it means that she ceases to exist ”as a woman in the way that the concept of woman is publicly defined” (Ferretter, 2010, p. 148). So, she will have no other choice but to commit suicide.
- Conclusion
The Bell Jar reflects Sylvia Plath’s distress and disappointment that is mainly due to the masculine society in which she was living at that time. Esther Greenwood as the protagonist of The Bell Jar is living in a society that considers women as inferior to men. Through this novel, Plath has presented the society’s role and beliefs towards women in the 1950s. As Plath’s own reflection, Esther desires to be a writer; but according to that time’s society, such a career would not be acceptable for a woman, since it is regarded as an un-feminine role for a woman. It is due to such beliefs that the female role in society has been restricted, making it impossible for women to do whatever they desire. The book is according to E. Miller Budick (1987), a ”solution to the sociological problems of women, a language and an art competent to secure women against male domination” (p. 872). Through this novel, Plath meant to stimulate women to discard society’s forced roles, and to become more self-determining. She also wanted to show the harmful effects of such constraints, leading to their mental disorder and suicide. The application of Friedan’s theories showed that The Bell Jar can be regarded as a clear manifestation of that era’s discrimination.
References
Bernard, C. K. Sylvia Plath. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co. (1978).
Bonds, D. S. The separative self in Sylvia Plath’s the bell jar. Women’s Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal,18(1), pp. 49-64. (1990).
Beauvoir, S. D. The second sex. 1949. Trans. HM Parshley. Harmondsworth: Penguin. (1972).
Bressler, C. E. Literary criticism: An introduction to theory and practice. Longman: Boston. (2011).
Budick, E. M. The feminist discourse of Sylvia Plath’s the bell jar. College English, 49(8), 872-885. (1987).
Buell, F. Sylvia Plath’s traditionalism. Boundary 2, 5(1), 195-212. (1976).
Butscher, E. Sylvia Plath: Method and madness. New York: Seabury Press. (1976).
Ferretter, L. Sylvia Plath’s fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (2010).
Friedan, B. The feminine mystique. London: Penguin Books. [First published 1963]. (2010).
Gerhard, J. Desiring revolution: Second-wave feminism and the rewriting of twentieth-century American sexual thought. New York: Columbia University Press. (2001).
Höhn, M. E. E. Out of her mind: Female insanity from the 1890s to the 1970s on the basis of women’s social history in” The yellow wallpaper”, The bell jar, and Surfacing (Master’s thesis). University of Oslo. Accessed 7 June 2017. Retrieved from <https://www. duo.uio.no/bitstream/handle/10852/25512/66828.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y>. (2007).
Holt, J. The ideal woman. Turlock, CA: California State University Stanislaus Indiana University Approved Rooms for Women Official Rental Contract. Retrieved from<http://www.demonish.com/cracker/1431175745_386f28f6ec/holt.pdf>.(2006).
Lamb, V. M. The 1950’s and the 1960’s and the American Woman: the transition from the” housewife” to the feminist. (2011).
Lauretis, T.D. Rebirth in The Bell Jar. New York: Routledge. (1976).
Maple, J. The intersection of feminism and disability theory in Sylvia Plath’s the bell jar. UCLA Center for the Study of Women. UCLA: UCLA Center for the Study of Women. Retrieved from: http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/16j6q39s(2009).
Matthews, G. Just a housewife: The rise and fall of domesticity in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [First published 1987]. (1989).
Mikkelson, B., & David, P. How to Be a Good Wife. Snopes. com, 2. (2008).
Perloff, M. G. ” A Ritual for Being Born Twice”: Sylvia Plath’s’ The Bell Jar’. Contemporary Literature, 13(4), 507-522. (1972).
Plath, S. The Bell Jar. New York: Harper & Row. (1971).
Radek, K. Women in the twentieth century and beyond. Women in the twentieth century and beyond. Accessed 23 June 2017. Retrieved from <http://www2.ivcc.edu/gen2002/twentieth_century.htm>. (2001).
Robin, P. Sylvia Plath and cold war politics. London: Dickinson University Press. (2002).
Roth, B. Separate roads to feminism: Black, Chicana, and white feminist movements in America’s second wave. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (2004).
Smith, R. Seeing through the Bell Jar: Distorted female identity in cold war America. Aspeers: emerging voices in American studies, 1(1), 33-55. (2008).
Wagner, L. W. Plath’s the bell jar as female bildungsroman. Women’s studies, 12(1), 55-68. (1986).
Wolf, N. The beauty myth. London: Vintage. [First published 1991]. (2015).
(To Download PDF File of This Full Article in full Details, Click Here)
